


An Absence Shaped Like You

by sorrybabyxx



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Asshole Villanelle, F/F, Flashbacks, GONE GIRL AU, Mystery, Unreliable Narrator, asshole Eve, first person eve, sex ... at some point
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-15 03:46:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29429760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sorrybabyxx/pseuds/sorrybabyxx
Summary: Eve isn’t sure how she got here: living in the kind of town she swore she never would, suspended from her dream job as a homicide detective, locked in a dutiful loveless marriage, and obsessively chasing the one killer she isn’t allowed to catch.A mysterious young woman moving in across the street offers Eve a reprieve from her empty life. Villanelle becomes her new obsession, allowing Eve's to start moving on and find herself.Eve’s life changed for the better when Villanelle moved in, but her would change again, this time for the worst when the young woman disappears.As Eve fights to find out what happened to her, questions arise about who Villanelle was and what brought her into Eve’s life.
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Niko Polastri, Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 12
Kudos: 33





	1. Happy V Day

**Author's Note:**

> a gone girl au. 1st person. hope you dont hate it :]

Are you meant to recognise the back of your husband’s head? After all, I saw it first, before his face. The back of his head, the shape of his hair, as I drifted around the London bridge club hunting for a table to join. I found him, a brown buoy in the sea of grey.

As I watch him now, from across our island bench, he looks like a stranger. I’d lose him in a crowd, or never spot him. I can’t recognise that feeling either, the one written in the margins of that first memory, the page once dog-eared and scrawled with the phrase, _“love at first sight.”_

To me, his skull is transparent. A safe made of glass. He must think I’m cold because I never ask him what he’s thinking or how he’s feeling, but it’s ‘cause I know.

I can feel him thinking.

The tension hasn’t subsided from our talk last night. Why would it? We left thing so unresolved, so raw, and unfinished. Despite all his efforts to pretend otherwise it hangs off him as he turns around. I know his face and the mind that drives it too well. Predictable.

He’s thinking the same things I am: _How did we get here? How do we get out of this?_

But my questions rings on, beyond the two of us.

I wonder if he looks at me and sees a stranger. I can’t blame him if he does, I’d felt myself distorting these past few months, it only made sense that those shifts had made their way to my observable surface.

Wordlessly, Niko places a coffee, that I didn’t ask for but wanted, before me. Intuitive. Well-trained.

I know from the colour it’s just how I like it. I take a sip, struggling to remember how he likes his.

Black, I decide, before getting a peek at his blonde cup.

It makes me feel guilty.

It isn’t the coffee that making me feel that way, but what I know I have to say, what I must finish.

‘Niko…’ I start and he freezes. His whole body recognises my tone. ‘This isn’t working anymore, is it? I think we -’

‘We should go to therapy.’ He’s nodding, fiercely, for the both of us.

‘Aren’t we passed that?’

He frowns. Blindsided.

My toast pops. It’s still brilliant white. I turn and clamp it back down.

It gives him time to find the clock. ‘We’ll talk about this when I get home from work, okay.’

The “okay” isn’t a question. It’s a plea. A cry for mercy.

And I stand to stop him, but his bag is over his shoulder, his keys are in his hand and he’s going for that ritualistic goodbye kiss. As he leans in, his eyes beg me to go along with it, to let today be like all the rest. Despite my admission he hasn’t seen a reason to halt this persisting loveless tradition, so I let him take it. The bristles tickle my lips even after the front door closes.

He waves at me through the window as I look past him, across the street at _her_ house. It’s a mirror image of my own. Identical and adjacent all at once. Parallel. We were never meant to touch.

I take a sip of my guilt spiked coffee and wonder when she’ll be awake.

***

I don’t hear from her. I don’t even see her.

Frustration keeps rising up inside of me, as I go about my day, waiting for her but not allowing myself to acknowledge that I am in fact waiting. I don’t know why I expected any different. She wants to make me panic a little. I keep myself from calling, too stubborn to give her the satisfaction of knowing it’s working.

I spend the rest of my time stuck in my thoughts preparing and galvanising myself for when Niko comes home, I need to have all my arguments laid out, my talking points down to keep him from sidestepping this again.

I pinball between these two trains of thought all morning and lunch time comes so quickly I nearly forget to meet Bill on his break.

In his arms, in his embrace, I tell him I am leaving Niko. He doesn’t let it reach his voice, but I feel him stiffen. This is about the reaction I was expecting. It is coming out of nowhere for Bill. But I needed to tell someone. I need to make it my reality even without Niko’s co-operation.

When we come apart, Bill’s expression echoes Niko’s confusion. He shakes my shoulders. ‘Since when?’

‘Since now,’ I answer as we slide into our booth.

He is wearing the discreet plainclothes uniform of a homicide detective, the same kind I used to live in. I looked good in them too. Button ups and slacks ironed with a firm crease. Now they’re all boxed up and moth eaten, and I sit across from him in sweatpants and a graphic tee. My leather shoes swapped out for my orthoptics.

I couldn’t tell you how many times Bill and I have sat here. Ordered two coffees destined to go cold while we chat. Mainly about work, cases, the banality of it all, then - to liven things up - bitching about Frank. Sometimes about our lives. That is always important, especially with a partner, to peek past their work persona, to know them, their ticks, their faults. I’d kept a similar ritual with Elena back in London – before Niko and before she decided to be a lawyer. 

I sigh at the thought and hear Niko bitterly teasing me, “Every breath you let out here is a mournful sigh for London.”

He wasn’t wrong.

I feel displaced in Middlesbrough. I don’t want to be nice to my neighbours. I hate going to the shops and running into a five different people who want to talk about the weather. I’m not built to live anywhere where you are expected to maintain a garden. London is hectic. Lively. I got to disappear there.

Middlesbrough is so … middle ground. Nothing grand to it, nothing horrible either. It is so painfully bland. It is the kind of place that makes ruining your life seem like a good idea. I hadn’t notice just how utterly empty and vapid this place was until I was forced to sit still in it.

Bill doesn’t count of course, he’s the exception. It’s not his fault his wife wanted to settle here after the baby. 

The quaint café we meet in most days has the only good coffee in town, comparable to London on its best days but it’s vibe is all off, too polite. You can’t ever escape it, the feeling of being watched.

Here, Bill and I are regulars, we claim the same booth and summon the same server. The café is further from the Department than anyone else is willing to walk, that distance is a blessing now, it narrows the chances that I’ll cross paths with any of our colleagues. Well, I suppose, they are just Bill’s colleagues now.

My bombshell is interrupted by ritual, as our favourite barista, Kenny, takes our orders. Bill flirts, Kenny fumbles, I read the menu like one day it might change. It gives Bill a moment to recentre himself. I know he has plenty to say about my confession.

With a jolly smile Kenny departs, I fold away the menu I’ve been pretending to peruse, and Bill begins. ‘Sorry, if this isn’t the reaction you wanted. I’m shocked.’

Bill is a no bullshit kind of best friend. He loves you and he considers it his duty to tell you when you’re being an idiot. He doesn’t coddle. I like that and have a feeling he’s about to tell me I’m being an idiot.

He leans in, deciding his words need some privacy. ‘I thought you two were good. Happy. Happy enough, at least.’

‘Me too.’ I sweep granules of sugar from the table instead of looking at him. ‘Then, happy enough wasn’t good enough.’

‘You just – you never mentioned anything. No problems. No big fight. No struggle. What is it? Is this really to do with Niko?’ He tilts his head, so I see him even as I clean. ‘You’ve been through a lot lately. You sure this isn’t to do with your suspension? Being stuck at home, worrying about what’s next? Maybe some kind of midlife crisis? ‘Cause all of that, I can get. You’re unsettled, maybe you want to let off some steam. You don’t have to torch your marriage to do that.’

I meet his eyes. ‘What would you know about any of this? You and Keiko are happy. In love. Too in love, it’s hard to be around.’

‘Have you ever thought the cause of our happiness _is_ communication, a greater understanding of one another desires? When is the last time you and Niko talked, like really, honestly, talked?’

Bill can feel the holes in my story, like rips in a stocking, and he’s plays with it as we talk, widening it, bearing my flesh. My instinct is to pull back, physically, I lean away trying to cut off this line of question. I should know better than to half-heartedly confide in a detective. I am just throwing him a scent; he can’t help but chase it.

I cross my arms. He’s waiting for an answer.

‘It’s more complicated than that.’ I verbally swat him away. Because I can’t recall a time we ever have, instead I relive Niko’s messy attempt to do just that last night.

He puts his hand up as I hold myself tighter. ‘I’m playing catch up, obviously. If you’ve tried everything, then you’ve tried everything.’

I scowl out the window. Why do I have to have tried everything? What is everything? Every position, every personality? Is there some contortion I could perform that will make everything fine again? Some core trait that I should remove from myself?

The truth is, we haven’t tried everything. We have stayed the same course for eleven years. I didn’t inquire about changing our route, I’d just asked to get off.

Kenny waddling over with two very full cups complete biscuits balancing on the saucer, put the conversation to bed properly. We thank him. I drown my biscuit in the foaming steaming ocean of cup. Bill leaves his, skimming the foam from his cup with a spoon.

The topic of conversation shifts from my failed marriage to my failing career. I want to hide under the table or lash out and pick on Bill’s receded hairline. But I don’t. I endure it. He is being a good friend. Checking in. Offering support. Much of it is going over the same things, hitting the same beats, when my review is, my defence, the board, the incident.

At least today there is a new detail for us to discuss.

‘The new Detective Superintendent finally started, Carolyn Martens. She’ll probably be in charge of your review.’

‘What is she like?’

‘Terrifying, but I think you’ll like her. She’s sharper than Frank.’

‘Everyone is sharper than Frank,’ I say.

I can’t tell whether this is good news or bad. Frank is vindictive, but dim, the kind of guy you buy a pint to earn his forgiveness. And that is exactly what my plan had been, to run into him at his favourite drinking hole, buy him a few, talk ‘til we were chummy then let him smooth things over with the board for me, his new best buddy. ‘Do you think it will hurt my chances?’

He shrugs. ‘Hmm…she seems – I wouldn’t call her by the book but perhaps by _her_ own book.’

‘Great,’ I mumble into my cup.

‘Peel is back in town. Not that I need to tell you that. Just – just try not to piss him off. We don’t need him sticking his nose in and influencing your review.’

It’s like a jolt. I sit bolt upright at the mention of his name. My face hardens as I say, ‘Can we not. I don’t want to talk about Aaron Peel.’

Bill nods, letting it go but his fingers tap against the laminate tabletop before he asks, ‘Do you think you’ll move back to London, if you and Niko really are done?’

There is a flicker of hurt in his eyes. No matter how many times I told him that he is the shining gem of this place for me he still understands if I leave, I’d be leaving him too.

I tell him the truth. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do.’

Because I don’t know what _I am_ doing, this morning has only made that more and more clear. I really don’t have a plan. Maybe I should have had one.

In the moment of quiet I fidget, then check my phone. It’s an anxious gesture. The screen awakens long enough to show me it’s empty, no missed calls, no messages.

Bill clocks it. ‘Expecting to hear from Niko?’

‘No, a neighbour.’

‘The twenty something?’ He leans back. ‘She probably went out and stayed over someone’s place last night.’

‘She’s single.’

He shrugs. ‘Even more reason. No one wants be alone on Valentine’s day.’

Valentine’s day. How have I missed that? I’m sure it was right there this morning, todays date captured in a heart on the calendar in the kitchen. I take in the coffee shop a new, it’s decorated accordingly, pink and red hearts are etched onto every chalk board. They proclaim, _free heart shaped biscuit with every large coffee._

I finally take in the half eaten biscuit balancing on the edge of my saucer, the red icing, and the cartoon style skewered heart.

My stomach sinks. Am I really the kind of woman who ends her marriage on Valentine’s day?

***

I’m more jittery than usual.

I tell myself it’s the caffeine rising my heartrate. But I know it isn’t. It’s worry. A build-up of anger that resulting from a lack of control, a lack of knowledge.

I should have heard from her.

The thought passes through me with every heartbeat.

Time warps. Then I’m standing on her porch. My worried face stares back at me from the golden number twelve mounted to her door. It’s eery. The houses, hers and mine, look the same. They are mirror images of one another, copy and pasted across the street, but in all the small deviations, points of character, hers is nicer. The paint job is even, bonded to the house while ours is flaking away, like a reptile shedding its skin. It wears the years we’ve lived in it. Hers looks like ours the day we moved in.

I know it bothers Niko. It bothered him when the accountant and his wife lived here, it bothered him when it was empty. So, when she rolled in, no stuff, no partner, no dependants to fill all those extra rooms, it infuriated him.

Her spare key is slippery in my sweaty hand. The lock and the fates collaborate, hesitating to let me in, and offering me a warning that I’m to brazen to hear. I grunt and the lock yields.

I go in angry, but it always takes me aback to stare into the fun house mirror of my hallway. Its richly decorated. It started out minimalistic. An aspiration that didn’t meld with her true habits, her pension for online shopping and shiny things. It is all still neat and in its place.

‘Villanelle,’ I yell.

It bounds off the walls, up the stairs, touches every wall before wobbling back to me.

A chill runs up my spine, something isn’t quite right. An instinct off firing. For a well-read woman I held my instincts up on a pedestal. Or perhaps they held me, forced my hand steering me to their whim. It slows down my steps but increases my intent. If I were some shaky beat cop this is when I’d be fiddling with my holster.

Cold sweat. A heartbeat that feels like your heart is in your skull.

This is how I imagine all those families I work with feel before they find a clue to something terrible, blood, even a body, a shock that would change their life forever and weave their path through mine.

But I reach the kitchen, the vantage point through which you can see the whole bottom floor and I don’t find anything. No cause for alarm.

I yell out again. Then I wait for her footsteps, her annoyed answer that would dispel my worries.

Nothing.

I push on, climb the stairs, and find her bed made. I trace the undisturbed silk and put a name to what the chill teased, not tragedy but emptiness. All her things are there, hung on hangers and stuffed in cupboards but it feels barren. Untouched in a way I’ve never known it. I check the rooms again, but it feels like I’m strolling through a showroom, modelled for after a young successful woman. There is nothing of Villanelle here.

I text her. Then I call her again. Unlike last night, her phone doesn’t even ring. It ends. Full stop. The line I cast can’t reach her.

I call her other phone too. So discreetly saved under “V” in my phone. I rewind back to the last time I saw her, the last time I heard from her. In person: yesterday. Through text: last night.

 _Too long_ , I think as a phone starts ringing upstairs.

I hang up with her phone blaring in my hand after retrieving it from her bedside table.

I can read my desperation through the bars of her locked screen. The messaged probably unread, but surely, unforgiven.

I check the garage last. An afterthought. The carless echoing room allows me to exhale as I try to deescalate some of my panic. It doesn’t work, even as I attempt to rationalise it. Not every missing person is a homicide. Not every whisper is a conspiracy.

She probably wanted to clear her head and went for a drive. A really, really long one.

I can’t help but wonder why she hasn’t picked up to at least put me out of my misery. Is she playing games or trying to teach me a lesson?

***

By the time Niko gets home I’ve chewed my nails down to the nerves.

‘Didn’t see Villanelle around today?’ I ask him from my place on the couch before he’s even made it out of the hall.

He hesitates and gives a cagey answer, ‘Should I have?’

‘I suppose not.’ I mumble. Then in a rush of breath I unload, ‘I can’t get a hold of her. She hasn’t been home. Her car is gone. I asked around the street, no one else has seen her.’

He slips his bag off and crosses the room to me. It takes his hands gripping my shoulders to make me realise I am shaking. He meets my eyes and asks, ‘Should we be worried?’

There is so much bundled up in that little question. My mind screams “yes”. Instead, I whisper it.

His moustache slides across his face as he pursed his lips. He rubs my arms. ‘Not everything –,’ he pauses to pick his words, ‘something nefarious. She is always going in and out. My suggestion is we sleep on it. If she hasn’t turned up tomorrow morning, make a call to Bill, see what he can do.’

I bit my tongue. Niko thinks this is something else. Not facts and logic, but trauma and hysteria. My trauma. My hysteria. I know he thinks I see the world through a shroud of paranoia. I want to shove his hands off, but that is not what a rational person does after a reasonable suggestion to deescalate.

‘Yeah,’ I say before going back to biting my lip. The fragile skin finally splits.

Niko’s moustache stretches and resettles into a smile like he’s fixed everything.

I’m not like him, having a plan doesn’t calm me. I’m too impulsive for that, but quietly I decide to listen to him, the rational one, the one who isn’t famous for jumping to conclusions.

If it were up to me, I’d have flood lights and search warrants and someone watching Aaron Peel.

He stops rubbing my arms to pat down his pockets until I hear paper crinkling. He presents the dented envelope to me while he babbles, ‘I know we aren’t the kind of couple that does Valentine’s day. It’s the holiday of capitalism and all that, but you’re right. I agree, we need some … maintenance.’

Maintenance? I can’t decide if that take was incredibly optimistic or downright delusional considering our conversation this morning.

I open the envelope and unearth a rigid piece of card, matte and dotted with shining hearts. I read it twice before I realise what it is. I hold it up. ‘They make Valentine’s day themed couple’s counselling vouchers?’

His brows crinkles, as if he’s considering the absurdity of the decorated card for the first time. ‘Yeah. I suppose they do…’

The correction wobbles him for only a second before he starts selling it to me, ‘It’ll give you one less thing to worry about. With you job, settling in here and this thing with Villanelle. I just want you to know you don’t need to worry about us.’ He squeezes my hands to add emphasis, like if he didn’t, I might not believe it.

I flinch at “settling in”, as if I would finally see the light and take to the waters here.

The rehearsed script from this morning has vacated my memory. And I look at him, and the card dumbly. Mouth open. My tongue and conviction drying up.

I’m not one for signs but if I were, I would have been taking stock of the ones I received today. Bill’s caution. Niko’s protests. My own waning conviction.

They were all yellow. Screaming “Wait. Stop. Slow down.”

‘You’re right.’ I concede.

It feels safe to keep my mouth shut for now, at least until I figure out what’s going on with Villanelle.


	2. Girl Marries Boy, Boy Traps Girl

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eve reflects on a question and who is really to blame.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hellooo wanted to get this one out before ke week so i skipped a round of proof reading, if small mistakes annoy you check back tomorrow and ill hopefully have cleaned things up. if not, please enjoy.

〜 Diary Entry (undated) 〜

_“When did things start to change?”_

The prompt carries with it the assumption that this had an origin, that it hadn’t been inevitable.

I don’t know whether that could be presumed. Looking back, I can’t say whether I had a choice, or if I would have ever brought myself to make different ones. I think I know what Niko’s answer is, where he points the blame.

But if I had to diagnose a begin and find the first symptom, it was about a year ago, when Niko and I moved to Middlesbrough and sadly never left.

I can’t fault the reason for us coming. I’d co-signed it.

Visiting Middlesbrough used to be a semi-regularly occurrence when we lived in London. Nothing made Niko guilty like knowing a few hours away his widowed mother, Lidia, was alone and pottering around her cluttered house. Every month or so, we would spend a weekend visiting her, drinking tea, completing odd jobs, and trying to convince her to downsize.

During that last visit, I remember laying on our hotel bed, in the boxy room that reminded us of home and mumbling into his chest, ‘Promise me, we’ll never live in a place like this.’

He laughed as if to say “of course not, us living here? We could never be happy.” Then finally, when the laughter dried up, he promised.

I should have gotten it in writing, or better yet, in blood.

But the promise was doomed from the start. It conflicted with one I’d already made to him.

Niko is a cautious guy, but he isn’t cowardly. The only thing that truly scared him, he admitted in the smoky honest haze of a shared joint, was dying alone, diving into that possibly empty _after_ from a lonely last breath. I made him two promises that night, one: that he’d never die alone – provided I didn’t die first, of course – and two: that his mother wouldn’t either.

Neither of us saw the conflict of our promises until a few weeks after that last visit. The home phone rang, only his mother still insisted on calling the landline, and her stray complaints of a bothersome cough and fatigue hadn’t been so innocent.

Her doctor had found a shadow on her x-ray. It was all moving rather fast; she already had a CT scan, and it turns out there were more masses, all too small to show up on an x-ray but widespread. They wanted a biopsy, to be sure, but the look fear Niko’s face upon hearing the news and the tremor in her voice seemed sure it was cancer.

We upped our visits. But that wasn’t enough when radiotherapy and chemo started. It was clear she needed more care than we could offer from afar and with her too unwell and too unwilling to move to London, we went to her side, to watch her slowly die.

She couldn’t live in that house anymore. So, we bought a house in Middlesbrough, somewhere suited for her ailing state. Niko sold it to me as an investment. He had a plan for everything, but he refused to account for the possibility she might not get better.

Our combined wages afforded us something decent, along with the mortgage to match. We had a yard, two spare bedrooms and even a butler’s pantry. It was ten times the size of our apartment. Everything I owned, everything I was fit perfectly inside of that apartment. We had all this excess space, and we were obligated to fill it, to spend weekends in furniture stores getting into whispered fights about wood stains and what it would match the carpet.

Niko was particular about all of it, he wanted it to be perfect for his mum. But he filled the house like it was needed exhale. He picked up new hobbies, he started fermenting things. He bought a smoker. He started playing the guitar again. He settled in, embraced being the towns golden boy who came home to save his mother.

I never settled.

I missed my stained carpet, my Ikea furniture, I missed the clutter. Niko thought I was being immature. But that’s as close we got to addressing my hatred for this place. We had to be here, there was no point fighting over the particulars, at least at first.

So, I shrank back, I gave myself over to my work – the one part of life here that was familiar – claimed a room as my office and letting Niko’s vision dictate the rest of the house. That was my mentality, in the beginning, this was _for_ him, this was _his_ hometown. And it was my turn to sacrifice, he’d made plenty for me, accepting that he’d always be second place to my job. I repeated it like a mantra to keep me sane, so I didn’t snap and pile on. I let him have all his gadgets and distractions.

In the end, we spent two months setting up the house, she lived with us for three more before a particularly bad stint forced us to admit her to the hospital for pain management. Niko never wavered from his grand plan, he kept installing handrails around the place, in the shower, by the toilet for when she was well enough to come home. However, she was never well enough, the next move she made was into a hospice.

Niko spent every day after work at her bedside. I just couldn’t. I loved her, but she wasn’t my mother. I didn’t have the same inbuilt guilt as Niko. I went to see her a few times in the hospice but as she grew worse, I grew scarcer. When I saw her skinny wrists and veiny hands being into pincushions, I saw only my father.

He went slowly too. He dripped away. I was in my twenties, in college, in America, and nursing my father. The textbooks that I spent my nights cramming over, while dad’s hoarse breathing bleed through the thin walls, were full of brutality and murder that felt less cruel that watching him deteriorate. Humans dismantling each other made more sense than the natural phenomena unfurling my father, more sense than a cruel line of DNA or time. I began to prefer it, the preventable death to the unpreventable.

His was the first dead body I ever saw that wasn’t contained within a textbook. No amount of bloodshed or brutality I’ve seen since as a homicide detective can compare to the violence of seeing someone you love to be emptied out by death.

America didn’t feel the same without him, I finished up my studies in criminal psychology and fled to London, back to barely speaking to my mother.

I fled and fled until I found Niko.

Now, death had me fleeing from him too.

In the end, Lidia didn’t die alone. I was up late working a case and Niko was at her bedside.

That’s when my resentment started to show after we laid her in the ground, and I’d assured him our presence had softened her passing and we didn’t go home. He never asked me if we could stay here. I put up a fight, but he’d buried his feet while I wasn’t paying attention, sunk roots too deep for me to pull free. “We have a house here,” he’d say. A house he’d convinced me was an investment, a place to rack up rent when we went home.

On another level I understood it, he’d lost his mother, which sparked a regression of sorts. Here, he felt safe. Here, he felt close to her. Here, I was suffocating.

I retreated further in my work.

Until I got suspended.

I didn’t have a leg to stand on after that, he was our sole income, and his job was here. I was expected to settle in, properly, this time, make non-work friends, get involved with the community. To give up my fantasies, to give up London, to give up hunting Peel and re-join the world.

I know that’s what Niko is writing, that’s his answer to this question. My work. Well, one case specifically. That’s the problem here. Niko will say things started to change the first time I read Peel’s name or saw his face. Something dramatic like that, like it was that simple, that immediate. Guilty at first glance.

It is just his thinly veiled way of blaming me.

And I’m aware that’s a rich sentiment after I’ve just detailed a thinly veiled reason to blame him. But I never would have encountered Aaron Peel if we hadn’t moved here.

I wouldn’t know any of their names.

Florence Nunez. Alison Pope. Matilda Müller

I wouldn’t see their faces in my sleep.

I first saw Alison and Florence’s grainy photo on Middlesbrough’s missing person site. Unconnected and separate by the four people who had gone missing in the two months between their disappearances. I’d visited the page on the train ride up from London. I wanted to get the lay of the land so to speak, the missing person list was one page in a long queue of tabs.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t think much of it, despite their similarities. They were both young attractive tourists, who had arrived in Middlesbrough alone and never made it to their next destination. Their rooms were left empty. None of their belongings had been abandoned. Investigation efforts were short-lived, they seemed content to believe the woman had moved on.

Except, on my first week in Middlesbrough, another young woman went missing, a German tourist whose more affluent parents were pushing for answers. Frank assigned it to me, the newbie. He never said it, but it was clear my job was to prove she’d moved on, prove that this is nothing.

But it wasn’t nothing.

In fact, Matilda was the piece that made what everyone had been hoped was a coincidence look like a pattern, a type.

Then they found a body while searching for Matilda. It wasn’t hers. It was Alison, buried in a shallow grave in the woodlands. The coroner ruled it a homicide by strangulation.

The evidence was compelling, and hope dwindled for those still missing.

We had a serial killer.

 _I_ had a serial killer.

I was going to _catch_ a serial killer.

It was exhilarating, aside from the paperwork.

It took two weeks of interviews and chasing leads to spot the thin cobweb that strung bound these women together. Aaron Peel.

To start with all three were staying in hotels he owned, on the surface that’s pretty damning, until you realise, he owns most of the hotels in town. But it was certainly proof he had access to them. Not to mention he coincidentally left town shortly after each of the women were last seen, returning only once search efforts had dialed back along with the investigation. The last girl, Matilda told her parents that she’d met Peel, even that he’d invited her to dinner. Making him, anecdotally, the last person to see her.

From the beginning, that line of reason was discouraged by the station. The department made moves to hide his involvement and keep his name away from the press. Every step toward Peel made Frank go greyer. They were terrified of him. When it was clear I wasn’t going to let up, Bill and I were _granted_ one interview with him.

The interview, you see, was a courtesy. They hadn’t let me drag him in, he’d offered, “to help us clear things up and get after the real bastard.”

It was one hour of easily side-stepped softball questions. Anytime I pressed him, he’d go quiet, cold. And Frank would glare at me.

By this point, I was so sure it was him.

In the end, he got to deliver his bulletproof alibi, footage of him in a meeting the night of the supposed dinner with Matilda Forgive me if I don’t trust immediately trust records produced by the company head of a tech company.

Frank didn’t forgive me though. I’d been humoured, I was meant to shut up.

Even Bill was trying to coax me from the scent.

‘You’re being a bit narrow-minded – what if it is a woman?’ He tried to be playful, throwing out my usual argument.

This wasn’t a woman. I’d looked into his eyes. I recognised him, that part in him he couldn’t quite hide.

They took me off the case. I couldn’t be unbiased, that was Frank’s reasoning.

You see, I had to learn this the hard way, but no one is meant to touch Aaron Peel. The Peels are a sort of royalty in Middlesbrough. The first line of Middlesbrough’s Wikipedia page boasts that it’s the birthplace of Alistair Peel’s fortune, the founder of “Pharaday”. As if the only way you would end up there was from his page.

The Peel fortune has long shaped this town. Alistair Peel never felt comfortable in the world his wealth allowed him access too. Instead, he lived out his life in Middlesbrough, in a modest house down the road from his high school. Under his influence, Middlesbrough was encouraged to stay the same. He funded the town’s dying iron industry, even as the digital age he helps create closed in. He wanted it just as he remembered. A time capsule.

When he died, the town was forced to bend to Aaron Peel’s influence. He let the iron industries fail and ushered in the new age his father fought so hard to hold off. He built a headquarters in town, he bought up hotels and swaths of land, to build suburbs, he invested in tourism. He funded local politics. He owns the town; their entire economy straddles his businesses, relies on his success.

He’s moulded Middlesbrough into something of his liking and had been defied for it. Suburbs arose to swallow heritage. The new began to outshine the old. As torn as residents might have been about the sudden change, they couldn’t deny how the growth has lined their pockets.

Unfortunately for Peel, we moved into one of those suburbs, I was a symptom of that growth.

And I’d took hunting him in my free time. Strung photos up in my office. Looked at them more than my wedding photos. Tailed him like I was a private detective. It was a game of wills, how long I could keep this up and how long he can hold off without killing again. It was a battle not between the body and spreading cells but a battle between my dedication and the killers. Did he want to be free more than I wanted to catch him, more than I wanted to be free from him?

That’s what I was doing the night Niko’s mother died, researching Peel. I let it spread through my life until there was nowhere for the slow unfair death to settle. I’d chose the crueller kind, the kind I was deluding myself into believing I could stop.

I had a great reason to be gone and distant. I was saving lives or at least, trying to.

And Niko got that until he started to resent it.

I felt righteous. Superior. That’s what got me suspended. I leaked his name and the evidence against him to the press, I wanted to apply public pressure to both him and investigators working the case in my absence.

It worked for about a day, the eager young gun journalist I recruited to do my dirty work gave the killer a name, “The Ghost” as he laid out the case against Peel.

The journalist’s phone was hacked, my involvement was leaked to the department. I have one good guess as to who is responsible for that one.

But that didn’t matter to the department. I was to stay from Peel if I ever wanted to be allowed back.

Three days later, I turned on the television to read the headline “The Ghost confesses, the killer is caught”. I smiled, for probably the first time in six months. Then they showed footage of “the killer” being loaded into the back of a car. She was small. I could barely make her out in the shifting crowd of officers. One thing was for sure, she wasn’t Aaron Peel.

I was numb as I listened to the newsreader stumble through her name.

Then my phone rang.

It was Bill.

I cut him off. ‘How long have you known?’

‘She turned herself in last night. Been working on it ever since. This wasn’t meant to drop yet.’

‘It’s obviously a lie.’

‘It checks out. Jin works for the cleaning company Peel uses in his hotels. We know she at least cleaned the hotel room while Alison was staying there. And she’s confessed.’

‘It wasn’t a woman. I know that. Peel must have put her up to it.’ It was perfect for Peel. It had to be manufactured. With me out of the picture and this woman claiming to be the killer, he was absolved of everything.

‘Why would he do that?’

It was the first time he’d really challenged me.

I stuttered. ‘Because he – he’s –’

I was going to say evil. Though accurate, I knew it wouldn’t be compelling.

‘I’m with you, Eve. But we’ve run out of ground. Everything else has dried up. There is nothing new on Peel. To ignore the facts in favour of a theory with little to no basis is irresponsible.’

‘No basis?’

‘You know what I mean.’ He took a moment to sigh. Patience wearing thin. ‘I’m just following the facts, Eve.’

I hung up.

We didn’t meet for coffee that day. I seethed at home, wondering in my more vulnerable moments if he’d gone and waited for me anyway. I never did ask him if he did, just assumed he needed a break from my shit too.

Without a word from either of us, come Monday, he was back in our booth. Peel and this woman, Jin, were off the table. I knew he was working the case; he knew I was digging in my abundant spare time.

Now, after writing pages and pages, and finally at the end of my recount, I suppose I can see Niko’s point. Peel drives me a little mad. Perhaps more so than Middlesbrough, itself. Maybe they are both to blame for starting this, and both of us are too. 

This was all before Villanelle arrived on the scene, but I’m sure if I could ask Villanelle for her take, she’d proudly say it was her. Her fault, her influence right from the start. She might be the only one who wants the blame for any of this.

She’d like that, being the origin of my downfall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A lot of backstory. Hopefully it wasnt too painful. Anyway, the next chapter is back to the mystery and fun.

**Author's Note:**

> trying something new with this. more explanation and flashbacks to come to help explain eve's backstory. its meant to be mysterious so hopefully it wasnt too disorientating. 
> 
> let me know what you think


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